How Financial Advisors Can Benefit from HubSpot CRM - ProperExpression

Every financial advisor understands the importance of technology in growing their business, but almost none have fully mature tech stacks.  

Just 3% of advisors say their technology is “integrated and innovative.” This leads them to lose out on opportunities to reach new clients, improve their service and save time with cutting-edge automation.  

This article explains why HubSpot is the best tech investment financial advisory firms can make today. It will demonstrate how HubSpot drives value across your entire business, solving several common challenges other platforms don’t: 

• Time limitations that reduce marketing impact and stifle client acquisition 
• Unstructured or poorly connected digital marketing efforts 
• Irregular or infrequent client communication 
• Operational headaches that keep you from revenue-generating activities

But we will also explore how you can generate even more value than the average advisor – and gain a lasting competitive advantage using HubSpot.  

Why Financial Advisors and Wealth Management Firms Need HubSpot 

Digital marketing is the future of client acquisition for financial advisors and wealth management firms. A new generation of high-net-worth clients are digital-native and rely on digital channels to find and evaluate potential advisors. As a result, advisors are shifting their focus away from cold calling and in-person events to digital channels like social media and SEO. 

But this creates a problem for most advisors: new marketing channels are difficult to navigate and time-consuming to learn. Digital marketing can be a major time-suck and loss-maker when not managed properly, with many advisors feeling out of their depth trying to leverage multiple channels at once – from maintaining their website to scaling email campaigns and growing on social media.  

Worse still, many don’t currently have enough support with marketing. They either handle it themselves or have a small team that is still overwhelmed and held back by resource limitations. And while solutions exist to simplify and optimize digital marketing processes, 86% of advisors find it difficult to select the right technology to support digital marketing. 

That’s why HubSpot is a game-changer for so many advisors and wealth managers. With an all-in-one CRM and marketing automation platform, you and your marketing teams gain a complete tech ecosystem – without creating extra complexity or adding 10 different platforms to their workflow. 

Why HubSpot is Better than Other CRMs 

Many advisors will be familiar with alternative customer relationship management (CRM) platforms like Wealthbox and Salesforce. However, our experience has found that HubSpot offers far more value and delivers an easier user experience for time-poor advisors. But this is not just a question of usability; it is a result of HubSpot’s unique capacity to go way beyond the standard CRM and deliver value across your entire firm. 

Understanding the 5 HubSpot “Hubs” 

HubSpot features five distinct “Hubs,” each of which makes life easier for advisors and wealth managers and helps grow their business more efficiently: 

1. HubSpot CRM 

Financial advisors need a large volume of data to understand their clients’ needs. But managing and analyzing so much data is a major time-suck; many relationship managers at wealth management firms spend up to 70% of their time on non-revenue-generating activities.  

The HubSpot CRM serves as a powerful foundation for data-driven advisors. It streamlines, simplifies and enriches client data to better manage leads and track client interactions – empowering you to: 

• Improve Client Relationships: Use a centralized database to manage client relationships, track interactions and automate reminders for key actions. For example, advisors can finish a meeting, quickly store new insights about their client and send a debrief email – all using the same platform. 

• Simplify Compliance: Seamlessly log communication via email, calls, and meetings to maintain a complete client history – and easily fulfill FINRA and SEC documentation requirements.  

2. Marketing Hub 

Digital marketing is central to modern client acquisition strategies, but most advisors feel overwhelmed by the digital ecosystem – and end up missing out on key growth channels. In fact, less than 50% of all advisors generate 5 or more leads per month through their website  

The Marketing Hub is a suite of marketing automation tools that makes it easier to cover all areas of digital marketing. The platform helps you attract, engage, and nurture leads through: 

• Scaling Email Marketing: Automate email campaigns to nurture prospects and existing clients with personalized financial insights. Imagine you’ve just introduced a new piece of technology that enables a new set of investment options; rather than sending 100s of emails manually, you can create a single email and send it to a specific client or lead “segments” with personalization fields to make the message feel tailored to each specific individual.  

• Accelerated Campaign Launch: Leverage intuitive tools to create new website pages, forms and email campaigns with ease. If you’ve produced an eBook, HubSpot makes it easy to create a landing page and form to gate the content – turning it into a powerful lead capture tool.  

• Increased Visibility: Use SEO and social media management tools to scale digital marketing efforts with a smaller time investment. While most advisors struggle to find time to post regular content on LinkedIn, the Marketing Hub makes it easier to both publish posts and monitor your results. 

3. Sales Hub 

The advisory sales process can be highly fraught: an excessively “salesy” approach will make clients suspect you are not focused on their best interests, but many are also anxious about their finances and struggle to make a decisive decision – leading to a slow signing process. 

The Sales Hub is a platform that helps advisors optimize sales processes and close deals more efficiently. It enables you to: 

• Deliver Smooth Follow-Up: Automate post-meeting emails and enable automatic appointment scheduling. Not only does this reduce your administrative workload – it builds prospects’ confidence in your capacity to deliver reliable service.  

• Manage Your Pipeline: Use pipeline management and deal tracking tools to optimize the client acquisition process. Advisors can predict revenue and identify bottlenecks in the sales process that keep them from acquiring more AUM or potentially landing higher-value clients. 

• Simplify Onboarding: Use e-signature and document tracking features to streamline contract and proposal approvals, helping you onboard clients with less friction. This is particularly useful for advisors going independent; it makes transitioning existing clients from your broker-dealer smoother – and increases the likelihood they will follow you.  

4. Service Hub 

Every advisor knows that client service is the heart of their business. Most simply lack the bandwidth to stay on top of all communications; more than a quarter say they “don’t have enough time” to spend with clients, and clients reliably report wanting more frequent contact with their advisors. 

The Service Hub is a client service management platform designed to solve these problems and deliver best-in-class service through:   

• Enhanced Communication: Leverage a ticketing system that efficiently handles client inquiries and support requests 

• Client Empowerment: Provide an expert knowledge base clients can use to access self-service financial resources and feel empowered 

• Assess Client Satisfaction: Deploy surveys and feedback tools to gather insights, monitor client relationships and improve your service 

5. Operations Hub 

Daily operations present a series of roadblocks for advisors. From compliance requirements to the burden of smaller firms’ back-office tasks, the “operational headaches” advisors report are very real – and very problematic.  

The Operations Hub is a system that connects and automates business processes across different platforms – helping to reduce those heads and allows you to: 

• Improve Data Interoperability: Ensure all data is accurate and easily accessible by syncing data across different platforms – from financial planning tools and accounting software to your CRM. You can also enhance data integrity by preventing duplicate contacts and incorrect information 

• Reduce Manual Efforts: Automate workflows to reduce manual tasks, such as updating client information across multiple systems 

In summary, HubSpot provides a comprehensive system to make advisors’ lives easier – from initial prospecting to improving long-term client relationships.  

This might sound complicated; there are so many useful tools to learn. But HubSpot also offers superior support and a far more straightforward interface. You will never be stuck waiting for support with HubSpot.  

The company offers three distinct support systems: 

1. Help desk and ticketing: Manages and resolves tickets using AI-powered tools 
2. Breeze Customer Agent: Provides 24/7 support with an AI-powered expert 
3. Knowledge base: Empowers advisors to find the information they need and solve problems without external help 

With this in mind, let’s look at a few ways you can get even more value from the platform. 

Expert Tips: 5 Ways to Get More Value from HubSpot 

Our experience working with financial advisors and wealth managers has found that five key practices produce the best results for most firms: 

1. Webinar Marketing

HubSpot is the perfect platform to manage that infrastructure and host an event that produces lots of high-quality leads. We’ve helped numerous wealth management firms plan, host and follow-up events that often drive 15x ROI, in large part because HubSpot simplifies the execution of promotional and follow-up campaigns. 

What to Do: 

• Identify a topic that is highly relevant to your target audience 

• Create a messaging framework that captures the unique value of the offer. This can be supplemented with HubSpot’s hyper-segmented audience lists to promote the event to a more niche or specific audience – and drive higher conversion rates 

• Use your framework to build a multi-channel promotional campaign using HubSpot (This article will help!). With HubSpot, you can sync everything from emails and landing pages to organic social and paid searches – allowing you to view performance data for the entire promotional funnel and quickly understand which channels produce the most registrants. You can even review this data post-event to see which channels produced the highest ratio of registrants-to-attendants 

• Develop a post-event follow-up offer and create a HubSpot email sequence to send immediately after the event. You can then build reports within HubSpot to analyze how registrants move through the funnel – and optimize your messaging and post-event strategy for future events 

2. Filling Nurture Gaps

Your client and lead databases might contain 100+ contacts – making regular manual communication extremely time-consuming. Most advisors lack the time to manage that workload, which explains why research consistently finds that clients want their advisors to reach out more often.  

Equally, prospects often lose interest in advisors when communication is infrequent; you need to remain top of mind and consistently engage in building trust and turning it into a sales opportunity. 

Use HubSpot to automate email campaigns that enable high-frequency and hyper-relevant content at every stage of the client journey.  

Let's imagine you produce a Financial Compliance Guide to attract leads and nurture existing clients. You can program HubSpot to send a follow-up email sequence in the hours and days after an individual downloads that guide, providing extra information or further reading that is directly related to the guide.  

What to Do: 

• Map your sales and marketing funnels to identify “Gaps” in communication 

• Create email sequences (between 2-6 messages) with dynamic fields for personalization 

• Set these sequences to trigger based on either specific events or lead scoring criteria 

The result? You make a small time investment to enable consistent, high-quality communication with zero effort moving forward. 

3. Gated Content

Of course, this does place a heavy demand on advisors: gated content must be higher-value and more detailed than the average blog or LinkedIn post. But most advisors have the expertise to deliver such content – what they tend to struggle with is managing the “gated” part of the strategy. 

HubSpot makes hosting and promoting your gated content faster and easier. You can quickly create all the extra digital assets required to host your gated content and deliver seamless follow-up sequences – turning a few hours of building a checklist or eBook into a powerful lead magnet that will continue delivering results for months or even years. 

What to Do: 

• Identify a topic your ideal client would want to read about 

• Create a high-value asset that offers comprehensive information on the subject 

• Build a conversion-optimized landing page to host the asset using HubSpot 

• Develop paid ads and emails to promote the asset 

• Leverage HubSpot to build a “thank you” page after the download, as well as a post-download email sequence to follow up with further advice or push for a sales call 

4. Analyze Audiences 

Data is a powerful source of insight for a range of purposes, allowing advisors to: 

• Make sense of new target markets and understand what content they engage with. You can understand the financial concerns and aspirations that drive new prospects’ behavior, as well as the information and messaging that resonate with them 

• Identify areas of your existing marketing content that are performing well or could be improved. You may find prospects want less technical or industry jargon; they might respond better to fact or statistic-based content than anecdotal advice 

• Assess how existing client engagement is trending and what you can do to improve your relationships. Many advisors lose track of the frequency of their client interactions or simply miss patterns in client behavior that could be leveraged to build trust. Perhaps a short weekly update or monthly check-in would produce a disproportionate up-tick in engagement 

HubSpot centralizes all your data to make this easier and enable advisors to make data-driven decisions. 

What to Do: 

• Make sure your HubSpot CRM data is clean and accurate (with zero duplicates!) 

• Create a centralized dashboard to view useful metrics, such as which channels are influencing sales, channel conversion rates and engagement rates 

• Plan a regular cadence to assess the data and identify trends or insights that can inform future marketing campaigns 

5. RevOps 

The average advisor spends just shy of $16,000 each year on marketing, with the average cost-per-acquisition for new clients coming in at $609. The sales and marketing process can take several months, with many prospects lost mid-funnel – and a lot of time and effort that comes to nothing. 

Most advisors could dramatically increase the efficiency of this process using HubSpot and revenue operations (RevOps) principles. Through sales and marketing alignment and systematic process automation, advisors can more effectively move prospects through the funnel and increase the number of new client acquisitions – while reducing the average cost. 

What to Do: 

• Automate sales hand-offs and lead scoring processes 

• Create a centralized dashboard to track how sales and marketing collaborate and generate revenue 

• Identify and eliminate bottlenecks in the sales and marketing funnels 

Get a Free HubSpot Consultation 

ProperExpression has helped countless companies leverage HubSpot to drive measurable performance improvements - with one recent client increasing inbound generated revenue by 466%. In just 15 minutes, we can quickly assess your current marketing situation and offer clear guidance on whether HubSpot would benefit your firm. 

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